Alone together: my weird morning in a virtual reality chatroom
AltSpace VR has already attracted more than $15m (£10.6m) in venture capital funding, and Mark Zuckerberg has talked about multi-user VR as the future of social media. There are alternatives to AltSpace, such as vTime and VRChat but this one is getting a lot of interest due to its multi-platform compatibility and array of features.
Organisers of real-life events can also arrange to stream live footage into AltSpace – there’s even a plush cinema viewing room where you can stand and watch. Facebook streamed the recent Oculus Connect 2 conference into the world.
We don’t have to ask about age or sex because those come through, to some extent, in our voices. That’s the first really intriguing thing about VR chat – if you talk, it’s harder to disguise your gender; you’re giving away much more real-world information about yourself.
At the same time, there’s no aural intimacy. If you’re in the same room with other people, you can hear everyone chatting at once and there’s little positional detail (even though the Rift and Vive support that function), so everyone is more-or-less the same volume.
But it’s all so strange at the moment because our brains are still adapting to this brave new world. It is crazy to be both embodied and not embodied in a space. To have the visual cues of physical intimacy without any physical intimacy at all. There were times when I cocked my ear towards another speaker in the room to hear them better. Of course it made no difference but some part of me thought it would. All those little indicators of mood and intention that accompany our movements and facial expressions in the real world are lost here. We have our voices and weird, unresponsive metal bodies. We are souls in an alien world.
See the full story here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/alone-together-my-weird-morning-virtual-reality-chatroom-alt-space